SEVENTY FIVE NEXT !!

Another birthday has passed and in my birthday week we ate at some of our favourite restaurants.  The troglodyte pizzeria in Loches had had another makeover for Christmas.

On my actual birthday we went to the déchèterie!  What a treat!

We had to go because we had a lot of gardening and other rubbish to dispose of and opportunities were limited.  However, I did find a nice birthday gift on the "help yourself" table - four lovely dessert bowls, perfect for trifle or ice cream.

In the evening we had a delicious meal in the hotel in the village.  Its restaurant is called "L'Auberge".

The village looked very festive as we walked back to the car.

Later in the week we sampled the Christmas menu at Brody's.

The smoked sausage was very good.

I made a pumpkin and mincemeat cake in my forest Bundt tin for my birthday.

It was delicious!

 On a beautiful sunny day we went to the Christmas market at Bossée-sur-Claise which was great fun.

One of the food stalls was serving tartiflette so we had another good lunch!

In our art class we painted Christmas robins.

After we had deposited Yvonne in the cattery on the eve of our return to the UK for Christmas, there was a gorgeous sunset.  Such things make leaving France hard to do.   Hugo comes with us as he travels really well.  Yvonne does not travel well at all.

Soon after we arrived we continued the eating out and met up with friends who spend the summers in our part France for a get together and Christmas lunch.  It was great to catch up.

We went somewhere we had never been before, even having spent most of my life living in Derbyshire.

The Church Inn at Chelmorton.  Highly recommended.

After that, things went rather downhill.

The weather turned very damp and grey and we both succumbed to nasty colds.

All other festivities have been cancelled and we simply hope to be well enough to travel back to France on the 27th.  I am keen to fetch Yvonne from the cattery as soon as we can.

This was not the Christmas we had planned or hoped for.

Finally, in case you’re wondering, I have just turned seventy four.  It was my dad who would have said "I'll be seventy five next".  After every birthday he would add a year on, saying what he would be next, not what he was now.  It was his kind of joke.  Until the day he met his lady friend and then he started to say "we don't talk about our age" with a cheeky grin.  

It turned out that he had not been entirely honest with her and had knocked a few years off!  

A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS 

AND HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU ALL !!

NOTES ON CHRISTMAS IN RURAL FRANCE and three goes for photos

Christmas in rural France is not the same as in the UK.  It doesn't really get going until much later and there always seems to me to be less emphasis on the hard sell.  

Our favourite troglodyte pizzeria has made an effort at Christmas decorations.

 However, the supermarkets by now have mountains of chocolate and other seasonal foods.  

The French clearly take chocolate seriously at Christmas.

The weather has finally turned quite cold and we have had some spectacular sunsets.

One of the restaurants in town has announced their Christmas menu.

Not a brussels sprout to be seen and still very reasonably priced.

The hotel restaurant in the village hasn't quite got its Christmas decorations sorted yet.

It always looks fairly festive anyway.

We've been experimenting with new local wines and this is now a favourite red.

We are lucky to have three good eating places in the village although that may soon change.  There was an Irish night at Brody's with our local band Celtiqua performing.  It was an excellent night.

Winter is not as dull as some might think in rural France.

Unfortunately, Brody's is for sale and the owners of the third restaurant and the bar are all approaching retirement age.  This time next year we could have only one place to eat in the village.  We are patronising it as often as we can.  Use it or lose it.

Finally, we have resumed our class in watercolour painting.

This is the second of an exercise in perspective, which is much more tricky than I expected.

One of the good things about learning to paint is that you see everything around you with "new eyes".  We drive around saying "that view would make a nice painting" or "look at the perspective in that!".

Finally, finally, I have finally cracked how to upload photos to my blog using pictures taken on my phone which appear automatically in my photo library in my iPad.  Using the iPad:

Step 1:  Click on "insert image".  Select photos and click to upload.  Up comes the message "unable to upload photos to your blog".

Step 2:  Don't give up.

Step 3: Click on "insert image" again.  A quick flash of something on the screen then nothing happens.

Step 4:  Don't give up.

Step 5:  Click on "insert image" again.  Select photos and click to upload again.  As if by magic they appear in the post.  Third time lucky you get a result.  It's all a complete mystery to me but it seems to work!

MORE OLD STUFF AND A NEW SCARF

Back in October we went to a local brocante/vide grenier for a nosey.  It's a popular thing to do on a Sunday and the weather was pleasant.

It was not a great brocante, mostly old children's clothes and toys and lots of stuff that had clearly been kicking around in people's barns for years, brought out every year to put on a table and see if anyone will buy it.

Empty handed, we were heading back to the car when Nick spotted a box of stuff under a table containing, amongst a load of other junk, this candelabra.  It was pretty dirty and some of the ivy leaves were a bit bent but for only 1€ it seemed worth a gamble.  It cleaned up very well, the bent leaves were easy to straighten out and with a fresh coat of paint looks perfect for Christmas.  Bargain.

Last winter I knitted myself a scarf in green.  Half way through I found this multicolour yarn in Centrakor and thought it might be fun to make another one.  I'm looking forward to finding out how the colours work out.